Rockets fall asleep at the wheel in loss to Thunder

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As the Rockets tried to wrap their minds around a game unlike any other in NBA history, the numbers hit them harder than all those missed second-half shots crashing the rim.

Never had a team gone so far from one extreme to another, never had a Rockets team – on a night they had rolled through their best offensive half of the season – scored few points in a second half.

The Rockets could list all that had gone wrong on the way to a 104-92 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, feeling the stunning turnaround from a 14-point halftime lead to a crushing loss. The collapse, however, was so complete is stretched credulity.

“We had less than 20 points in the second half?” Chandler Parsons said. “In the entire half? That’s terrible I didn’t know that. It doesn’t surprise me because we played really bad in the second half. Nineteen in the whole half? That’s crazy.”

The disparity from the Rockets 73 points in the first half and 19 in the second was the greatest in NBA history and might have been most vivid in the way they fired 3-pointers before and after switching ends of the floor. The Rockets had made 12 of 20 3-pointers in the first half. They missed all 14 they put up in the second half.

Yet, as much as the 3-pointers missed doomed them, allowing no chance to hold off the Thunder – who went from an 0 for 8 first half beyond the arc to banking in a 3 to slam the door late in the game – the Rockets could not just blame the second-half 3-point shooting failure.

“First half we played phenomenally,” said James Harden, who did not score in the second half. “In the second half, if we’re not making shots, we have to find ways to make the game change for us. We just didn’t make shots and make layups around the rim. We had a couple opportunities in transition we didn’t convert.”

Much of that was about the Oklahoma City defense, with Kendrick Perkins banging Dwight Howard and Serge Ibaka flying over to help on him and anyone else that ventured into the lane. But as much as the Rockets had taken advantage of the Oklahoma City traps and switches on screens in the first half with rapid ball movement and a rush of 3-pointers, they fell into those traps in the second half when they could not make the good shots they got.

“We got more stagnant,” Rockets coach Kevin McHale said. “We came out and missed some shots. We had some good looks early in the third quarter. We missed some layups. Had layups blocked right at the rim. It seemed like our offense just at that point couldn’t make anything. We couldn’t make a basket. We couldn’t sustain anything.”

The more the Rockets missed those shots, the less they moved the ball. In the first half, the 3s came off penetration and passing. In the second half, the Rockets penetrated and let themselves become engulfed by the Thunder defense with none of the ball movement that their offense increasingly requires.

“We had some silly turnovers in that stretch,” McHale said. ‘We had some run outs, but we just got stagnant after a while with people trying to do it on their own, which we can’t do.”

While the Rockets misfired on the perimeter, Howard could get little going inside. He spent the second half in foul trouble, made just 2 of 8 shots and was hit with a both double foul and a double technical.

“There’s a lot of stuff I want to say but next game we have to be better and I have to be better,” Howard said. “In order for us to be good against a team like this, we’ve got to step it up.”

The Rockets did, but just for a half. When they hit a rough stretch, however, they crashed. The missed 3s made it all look worse. Nothing better demonstrated the complete turnaround from one half to another. But in the greatest turnaround ever in the NBA, the Rockets could not say they just relied on 3s and missed them, or that those shots just didn’t happen to fall after halftime. They broke down and had no idea what to do about it.

“We didn’t get anything in the second half,” said Jeremy Lin. “It seemed we worked a lot harder in the second half. To be honest, I really don’t know.”